moon_custafer | Monday Report

I disagree with pretty much this entire article from New Republic: While I can appreciate conserving original artworks and manuscripts for research purposes, and I can appreciate the fascination with the actual artifact that’s been around for centuries, I think that far from reproduction destroying the soul of art, art and texts need to be copied, passed on, rewritten and adapted in order to remain living.

I also suspect, though I’d have to consult with real historians, that the cult of the original only appeared once mechanical copying methods became common and accurate (the essay the author of the article references was written in the mid-1930s). If it takes as long to produce a good copy as it did to make the original book or artwork, then the copy is just as valuable (in the monetary as well as the cultural sense) as the original, and no one worries that everybody will be able to get their hands on one. Basically, in the Curatorial vs Transformative fandom fight, I’m on the side of Transformative.

Meanwhile, an artist in Germany is trying to fill a corner of a 7,000-year-old salt mine with shelf-stable (as in engraved ceramic tile) copies of digital stuff, for the benefit of alien/very distant future human archaeologists: . Since they’re derived from digital files these aren’t “originals.” They’re copies he hopes will survive.

I’ve no idea why Fritz Lang’s got a toy monkey in this photo, but it was evidently a day for bold choices. I suppose someone had to pair a monocle and a plaid flannel shirt, I just wasn’t expecting it to be an Austrian movie director in the 1920s. Lesbians need to step up their fashion game, is what I’m saying.

The chaperon is my favourite 15th-century headgear, because it’s a medieval hood flipped upside-down and tied, and (a) who was the first person to do that? and (b) how cool were they, that it caught on? Anyway, recently it seemed to me one could do the same with a hoodie, so I tried it out. It doesn’t form as dramatic a fall on one side, of course.I don't think Jan Van Eyck would be very impressed with me.

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-- 1930s article hahaha WAIT, is it the Walter Benjamin one?

HAHAHA IT IS, HOW DID I FUCKING KNOW

Poor Benjamin, he is so constantly mistreated by wannabe academics. I want to forbid them to stop quoting him for fifty years.

Seeing the earliest European book alone would be the event of a lifetime, for a certain kind of museum-goer. But for this viewer, the main attraction lay in a quiet little vitrine: all four Old English poetic codices, side by side. They don’t look that impressive to the casual eye.

oh my God you fucking snob

There’s no outward sign of how important they are, how unprecedented their meeting.

yes yes nobody can tell but You can, and you shall proceed to Enlighten us and also get paid for it, oh do go on

the concept of the original—a concept we have almost entirely lost touch with.

We live in a world where Bill Gates bought a da Vinci notebook for like 30M but yes, really, do go on (he then released a digital scan free on the internet!....no, I see why you wouldn't like this comparison)

The Beowulf Manuscript is not just composed of words that serve as the basis for every translation of the epic poem. It’s foremost an object, the only one of its kind. It is not merely a representation of a story; it is the story

WTF? and also no. You can say drivel like that about some actual fantastic manuscripts -- Keats's ode to a Nightingale is my fave -- but from what I know the ms we have is a transcript of another manuscript so it is ACTUALLY A COPY, hah. And let's not even get into the argument whether or not it's a transcription of an oral epic (my vote). And here we're getting into a whole thing about original artistic work from the brain of one (1) individual v oral tradition that takes place via improvisation and repeated refrains over years which is completely prejudicing your worldview, but ANYWAY.

(The original Cotton collection was kept, with a horrible kind of accuracy, in a building called Ashburnham House.)

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE. It just SOUNDS that way to you, because you are IGNORANT. "Ashburnham House" was called that because it was leased by Charles Ashburnham who was related to Charles I's John Ashburnham who had his estates IN Ashburnham, which was named after the Ashbourne stream which powered the Ashburnham Forge. "Ham" means village but in this case might also be "hamm" which specifically refers to something set in the bend of a river, LIKE A FORGE IIRC. So it's Ashbourne + ham, and has fucking nothing to do with ashes and burning, because in Britain "ash" as a place name means BY ASH TREES. Ashbourne, Ashburnham, Ashburton, Ashbury, Ashby, Ashley, Ashmore, I COULD GO ON. Ashfield does not mean FIELD OF ASHES FROM A FIRE. The name could even be a derivative or warping of Ashbourne, and in the first record of it in the Domesday Book it's ESSEBURN, from Old English aesc + burna, meaning "stream where the ash-trees grow." So saith the OUP Dictionary of English Place Names anyway.

AND LET'S NOT EVEN GO INTO VARIANT SPELLINGS. YOU WANT VARIANT SPELLINGS?Ashburnham, Asbury, Astbury, Ashburner, Ashbourn, Ashburn, Ashburnam, Ashburham, Ashbourne, Ashborn -- don't all the "original" examples we have of Shakespeare's signature show variant spellings? HMMM. So to clarify, ASH here means TREE, BURN means STREAM, and it is about as "accurate" as IDEFK, some other dumb Romantic idea cooked up on the total lack of etymology.

Why are these the manuscripts that have survived

PURE CHANCE, lots of the time, sorry to say. Or from the nice paper being used for something else, and then hundreds of years later "Hey what's this writing on the back of this...."

In 2018, we are in a much more elaborate and abstracted phase of Benjamin’s reproduction theory. We are accustomed to reading without reference to any physical object specific to the act of reading

I’ve spent years dreaming of these books, but when all five of us finally met I couldn’t do anything but cry. I thought I knew them, through digital replicas. These books should have been a mirror, some kind of catalyst to self-recognition. But when I looked at them I saw nothing. I only saw the yawning void of everything in human history that I cannot understand, everything that has been taken from our culture by the incredible acceleration of technology over the course of my lifetime.

OH, CHRIST ALMIGHTY

WHAT?

//dissolves into sputtering froth

We live in a world where Bill Gates bought a da Vinci notebook for like 30M but yes, really, do go on (he then released a digital scan free on the internet!....no, I see why you wouldn't like this comparison)

That was in fact the assertion where I checked out on this essay, which was unfortunate since it was in the fourth paragraph.

It's bizarre. I mean I guess the author could argue it's an inflated price for originals since we are now so out of touch with yada yada yada, but to just flatly state "we have lost touch with the concept of 'the original' work of art/book" is nuts. It's like what these people are always talking about is access, not the terrible unspecified damage done to the artwork and/or human soul by looking at a copy of copy of a...., and that always gets my back up. I mean what she's talking about is not at all a new phenomenon but the attempt to blame it all on The Digital Age is really a kind of newly infuriating twist.

I keep seeing variants of this:

Pundit: Social media has led to unprecedented numbers of people egotistically blogging and posting photos of their lives! What will future generations think of us, assuming this doesn’t cause civilization to collapse totally?!

Historians: Assuming future historians and archeologists are anything like the ones today, they’ll be thrilled at having so much information on the lives of ordinary people in the early twenty-first century! You never know who’s going to turn out to be important further down the road – some biographer may be terribly grateful to have the juvenilia of a famous writer! Also, if novels, the penny post, bicycles, the telegraph, etc. didn’t destroy civilization as predicted, the world can survive Instagram, you snob!

You never know who’s going to turn out to be important further down the road – some biographer may be terribly grateful to have the juvenilia of a famous writer! Also, if novels, the penny post, bicycles, the telegraph, etc. didn’t destroy civilization as predicted, the world can survive Instagram, you snob!

Also, people have always documented their lives insofar as it was possible: it's why we have graffiti. Do I think there are issues with the branding and commercialization of social media? Absolutely. But I blame that more on capitalism than on the human desire to have photographs of oneself doing neat things with one's friends.

Yeah, I think in that article and a whole lot of writing about "online inauthenticity" or egoism or whatever there's a bad conflation between what's actually digitally happening, and how it's being set up and marketed. For one thing the social media companies are being driven by two huge revenue streams -- trying to sell consumer info to other companies (wildly successful!) and trying to get consumers to look at ads about other companies (not so much!) -- and the way they try to set those up has a huge influence on how people use the services, how the services are designed and conceptualized, only somehow the 'Marxist' analyses like this never take that into account.

And the idea that you can somehow kind of experience the essence of authenticity by participating in the eidos of Beowulf or whatever just seems so wrongheaded to me. There are so few 'originals' of what she's taking as the ideal. That Beowulf ms is the first preserved instance we have of it being written, which is indeed wonderful, but it's not the Ur Original of the poem. There might not even have really been such a thing. The idea of poring over unfinished manuscripts and going "yes, this right here is where the spark flew and caught flame, we can mark it precisely!" is pretty modern, IIRC. It's like that whole cult of Originality goes along with the myth of the Genius Lone Artist and makes me twitch.

That Beowulf ms is the first preserved instance we have of it being written, which is indeed wonderful, but it's not the Ur Original of the poem. There might not even have really been such a thing.

Agreed. (Don't get me started on Homeric epic.) I think it's fair to talk about the power of original objects; it's real and it matters to me, because it's tangible history. I don't think it's helpful to conflate the medium with the message as drastically as the author of the article did:

"I've spent years dreaming of these books, but when all five of us finally met I couldn't do anything but cry. I thought I knew them, through digital replicas. These books should have been a mirror, some kind of catalyst to self-recognition. But when I looked at them I saw nothing. I only saw the yawning void of everything in human history that I cannot understand, everything that has been taken from our culture by the incredible acceleration of technology over the course of my lifetime."

It isn't technology that took that understanding from her. It's time; it's the frailty of memory and continuity; it's the gaps between one person and the next, between one generation and the next, between one culture and the next; it's all the things you can never know about someone even if you can read their handwriting for yourself. It's reasonable to grieve that, to be knocked off your feet by the evidence in person. It's not reasonable to blame the internet.

(And you should never expect someone else's art or material culture to be your mirror. You can find things in it that resonate with you and you have the right to hold on to them, but—literally—it was not made for you.)

It's like that whole cult of Originality goes along with the myth of the Genius Lone Artist and makes me twitch.

I guess it's good to know that Romanticism is alive and well in the New Republic, but did this have to be the way it manifested?

(Don't get me started on Homeric epic.)

//tries to plot how to get sovay started on Homeric epic composition

I don't think it's helpful to conflate the medium with the message as drastically as the author of the article did....It isn't technology that took that understanding from her. It's time; it's the frailty of memory and continuity; it's the gaps between one person and the next, between one generation and the next, between one culture and the next; it's all the things you can never know about someone even if you can read their handwriting for yourself. It's reasonable to grieve that, to be knocked off your feet by the evidence in person. It's not reasonable to blame the internet.

That's really beautifully put. (And yeah, why "should" those books in particular have been a mirror for her specifically? Gahh.)

I mean, I think there are actual Wrong Things about the internet and internet culture, like Facebook setting up its own newsfeed and refusing to act like a publisher or compensate news organizations, and the NYT grabbing reactions-of-the-moment to events off Twitter without permission, and Buzzfeed screencapping Tumblr posts to make 'articles,' and (let's not even get into the wholesale harvesting and sale of personal data without knowledge/permission)...but most of those have to do with compensation, and the worst form of capitalism where wealth is concentrated and clutched to death at the very top. And that's been going on a lot longer than the internet.

I think if anything the internet -- digital technological progress in general -- goes so fast it looks like some of these topics or problems are now qualitatively different, like the author of the article wants to think. But the problems aren't that new, and like moon-custafer has been pointing out the Death of Culture has been blamed on everything from novels to the telegraph. (I remember A LOT of arguments that were happily adapted to the internet being originally made about television. Doubtless they were once made about radio. Hell, I remember people fulminating against Walkmen -- "Isolating! Anti-social! Dangerous, your hearing will suffer/muggers will surprise you!" or even "How can people possibly enjoy movies if they aren't sitting in a beautiful theatre!" and so on.)

I’ve definitely come across people who know about some aspect of their family history solely because they came across some old snapshot and asked “Hey Great-Aunt Velma, who’s the woman with you and Grandad in this photo?” or “Wait, where was this taken? I didn’t know Grandma ever went to France,” etc.

Oh man, when there was a big surge in the US in diary-keeping -- I think it happened in the seventies, partly urged along by Anais Nin -- there were actual articles on "why should people keep daily records of their dull little lives," "how many of these will be reread even by the people who write them," "doesn't this point to a huge and worrying rise of egotism and narcissism in the culture," on and on. Same thing when people started being able to take cheap photographs on their own during vacations, rather than rely on postcards. There's still this fascinating (and enraging) rockbed belief that if it's not documenting the Life of Someone Important, it doesn't matter.

And going back to the whole "copies are not reality! This is a disaster!" thing, IIRC novels were thought to be actually unhealthy for people to read too much of, in a Don Quixote way. You can't get "reality" from books! or photographs! or online photos! or....

future historians and archeologists... [will] be thrilled at having so much information on the lives of ordinary people in the early twenty-first century!

The Paston letters writ large.

....wasn't there a recently published woman's wartime diary that was kind of similar? I think I remember oursin mentioning it....I thiiink it might have been this one https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/07/diary-of-a-wartime-affair-doreen-bates-review-adultery

I mean what she's talking about is not at all a new phenomenon but the attempt to blame it all on The Digital Age is really a kind of newly infuriating twist.

Especially when the choice is between having access to a copy and not having access to the information at all. I just watched a relatively crummy DVR-to-YouTube rip of an absolutely astonishing movie. Am I sorry I saw it on YouTube as opposed to 35 mm? In the sense that a print would look a lot better and would include all of the small fine details that digital generation loss fuzzes out, yes. It would have been nice to see it another way. Would I rather have not seen it at all, holding out for the film itself which may never play near me? Hell, no. I want a legitimate DVD of the thing. I'd have settled for fuzz-less streaming. It's how I watch most of my movies. Copies are democratizing.

Copies are democratizing.

YES
THAT'S IT

THAT'S WHAT I WAS TRYING TO SAY

THAT'S WHAT I WAS TRYING TO SAY

SOLIDARITY GLAD TO HELP

//VIRTUAL AND THUS CULTURE-DESTROYING FISTBUMP

....also now I'm amused that what got me really annoyed enough to bring in the noise and the froth was the parenthetical comment about how Horribly Accurate "Ashburnham" was.

I disagree with pretty much this entire article from New Republic

I disagreed from the moment the author says we've lost touch with the concept of the original and it just kind of went from there.

I’ve no idea why Fritz Lang’s got a toy monkey in this photo, but it was evidently a day for bold choices.

Thank you; that's adorable.

Edited Date: 2018-11-12 07:02 pm (UTC)

Lang had the best wacky fashion sense. There’s at least one on-set photo where he’s looking into the camera but I can still tell it’s him because I recognize his stripey sweater from other photos of the period.

There’s at least one on-set photo where he’s looking into the camera but I can still tell it’s him because I recognize his stripey sweater from other photos of the period.

Link?

http://mooncustafer.tumblr.com/post/179717048705/loveless422-otto-wernicke-on-the-set-of-m

Together with the shot I’m pretty sure they were setting up— the really low-angle one of Lohmann which everyone who reviews M mentions with a certain bafflement, because Lang doesn’t do anything by accident, but no one’s quite sure what the thematic significance of Otto Wernicke’s junk could be.

Together with the shot I’m pretty sure they were setting up— the really low-angle one of Lohmann which everyone who reviews M mentions with a certain bafflement, because Lang doesn’t do anything by accident, but no one’s quite sure what the thematic significance of Otto Wernicke’s junk could be.

That's wonderful, although I've learned more about Otto Wernicke than I expected to tonight.

Just so you know, “Wernicke’s Area” is a legit anatomical term (it’s part of the speech centre, and obviously named for a different Wernicke) ;)

....wow sorry, I had no idea all that froth added up to that much tl;dr. I mean, she might maybe, MAYBE have a point with the whole "our culture now is digital so we're not used to the idea of writing/reading original manuscripts"? But the truth is I've seen variants of that argument used against reproductions as various as mass market paperbacks, coloured mass prints of famous paintings (oh boy you should see the nasty cultural warfare that still goes on over that), typewritten mss instead of handwritten ones, and typically the argument gets mixed up between 'authenticity' and 'mass production'. Yeah it's a little depressing if you go to say a rock concert and see a sea of people holding up their phones and looking at the digital image, but that's happened ever since there were cameras, and people were looking through the lens at what they hoped to see represented rather than the "actual" thing. I mean if we REALLY want to go into the "actual reality" thing, everything we see should be upside down, mechanically speaking, because that's the image projected on the retina is inverted because the structure of our eye's lens is convex. Any more of that and we start slogging into Kantian turf of how much how we perceive influences what we are perceiving and that just turns into an unholy mess.

(EVERYONE cries when they get in front of famous arworks, because no, the reproduction can't really convey it. But that's Stendhal syndrome back in the 19th century! Way before even poor Walter Benjamin. What would he think of his arguments being so lifelessly and inaccurately reproduced to power such shitty articles. I'm always disappointed that nobody ever references Thomas Mann's writing about gramophone records in The Magic Mountain. That beats out Benjamin's essay by about 12 years!) (....and oh boy, this whole argument in the context of musical recordings, and the recording practices nowadays of digitally patching together a lot of different renditions to make one Super-recording, also gets really ugly.)

art and texts need to be copied, passed on, rewritten and adapted in order to remain living.

Yeah. Also this person needs to be bopped on the nose with a copy of Ways of Seeing. Also also, although I was pretty disquieted myself at the move from typed 'originals' to working on digital 'copies' only visible on a machine, I REALLY don't think this maps to original mss the way she thinks it does. Benjamin is talking about photography, and film, and Berger later on is taking up the theory of mass production, with some heavy duty Marxist theory about alienation. I mean Benjamin sounds like some 21st-century snob talking about blogging for God's sake

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing.

wow sorry, I had no idea all that froth added up to that much tl;dr.

No, I'm glad to see it wasn't just me who thought the whole thing was a heap of snobbery.

SO SNOBBY. I truly don't think Benjamin's point in his essay was "all these unwashed masses looking at bad copies of Art are Doin It Wrong and culture is hopelessly corrupted thereby," but that's what a lot of people have warped it into.

I truly don't think Benjamin's point in his essay was "all these unwashed masses looking at bad copies of Art are Doin It Wrong and culture is hopelessly corrupted thereby," but that's what a lot of people have warped it into.

“In 1936, Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and cultural critic, published an essay titled ‘The Storyteller.’”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/how-podcasts-became-a-seductive-and-sometimes-slippery-mode-of-storytelling

NOOOOooooooooooo
Maybe this article is better. After yesterday’s, I couldn’t bring myself to read it.

ETA -- Gave in to curiosity and read it – it’s better than the other article, I think; though I would have liked a stronger distinction between podcast and radio, otherwise the reader’s likely to think “what’s the big deal, broadcasting has been around for eighty years or so?” The differences between the two, in my opinion – the relative ease of making and distributing podcasts allows for more independently-produced shows; and unlike a radio broadcast, a podcast is selected, downloaded and listened to at leisure. This is the big difference – the “seductive” condensation/rearrangement of time that the article ascribes to some podcasts was present in, oh let’s pick the most obvious example, the Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds -- but it’s hard to imagine anyone mistaking that classic for a real broadcast about a Martian invasion*, simply because to hear it, they would have to download a file labelled “Mercury Theatre Presents: H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.” They’re not going to accidentally stumble in midway through the first half.

*I am also in the camp who suspect the public panic was at least partly exaggerated by the newspapers to discredit the rival medium, and there may also have been an element of “every crazy thing someone did the night of October 30th, 1938, was subsequently ascribed to “Martian Panic,” and not “Hallowe’en mischief,” like it would have been most years.”

Edited (gave in and followed the link) Date: 2018-11-13 06:52 pm (UTC)

No, I'm glad to see it wasn't just me who thought the whole thing was a heap of snobbery.

It is totally not you.

PURE CHANCE, lots of the time, sorry to say. Or from the nice paper being used for something else, and then hundreds of years later "Hey what's this writing on the back of this...."

Which is a reason I included the link to the guy making the time capsule – “Someone decided to send copies of their wedding photos to an idealistic artist who converted them to clay tablet form and buried them in a salt mine for thousands of years” is as good a reason as any for a document to survive. I mean, given that Actual Reasons have included “the town dump was in a nice dry climate,” or “Ea-Nasir kept all his business correspondence, even the unflattering stuff,” or “Charles Darwin’s kids used his old manuscripts for craft supplies, and he and Emma kept the sheets that had cute drawings on them.”

“Someone decided to send copies of their wedding photos to an idealistic artist who converted them to clay tablet form and buried them in a salt mine for thousands of years” is as good a reason as any for a document to survive.

I hope it works. The provenance notes in a future museum would be hilarious.

shelomit over on Tumblr posted a few weeks back that everyone ought to make a will, not just to avoid legal troubles over their estate, but for the sake of future historians trying to figure out how everyone’s related (admittedly said historians likely won’t have to deal with families where a half-dozen individuals all have the same given name).

“Ea-Nasir kept all his business correspondence, even the unflattering stuff,”

OMG, Ea-Nasir being remembered down through the actual millennia as (as someone on reddit said) the original CMOT Dibbler and makes me so happy. That the info is bouncing around digitally on the internet only makes it better. Now that's a true afterlife!

That the info is bouncing around digitally on the internet only makes it better. Now that's a true afterlife!

That Ea-nasir has a megafandom is one of the true achievements of the internet.

(I never saw the tablet in person, but I was introduced to its text in grad school, and it makes me so happy that it escaped into the wild.)

I think the only thing I've seen that's maybe better is the little....Viking? kid....who made drawings of himself in school or something. Dammit what is his name. //crap memory threatening to disprove own thesis whoops

Ewulf? Is that it? Something with an e?